Sunday, October 9, 2011

When managing in the wilderness of the changing times, a map is of limited worth. What's needed is a moral compass. When I was in New York recently, I witnessed a mugging skillfully executed by a street gang. I'm sure that the members of this gang have their street maps, their common values - the highest value being, don't fink or squeal on each other, be true and loyal to each other-but this value, as it's interpreted and practiced by this gang, does not represent "true north" - the magnetic principle of respect for people and property. They lacked an internal moral compass. Principles are like a compass. A compass has a true north that is objective and external, that reflects natural laws or principles, as opposed to values which are subjective and internal. Because the compass represents the eternal verities of life, we must develop our value system with deep respect for "true north" principles.

As Cecil B. deMille said about the principles in his movie, The Ten Commandments, "It is impossible for us to break the law. We can only break ourselves against the law."

Principles are proven, enduring guidelines for human conduct. Certain principles govern human effectiveness. The six major world religions all teach the same basic core beliefs - such principles as "you reap what you sow" and "actions are more important than words." I find global consensus around what "true north" principles are. These are not difficult to detect. They are objective, basic, unarguable: "You can't have trust without being trustworthy" and "You can't talk yourself out of a problem you behave yourself into."

There is little disagreement in what the constitutional principles of a company should be when enough people get together. I find a universal belief in: fairness, kindness, dignity, charity, integrity, honesty, quality, service, and patience.

Consider the absurdity of trying to live a life or run a business based on the opposites. I doubt that anyone would seriously consider unfairness, deceit, baseness, uselessness, mediocrity, or degradation to be a solid foundation for lasting happiness and success.

People may argue about how these principles are to be defined, interpreted and applied in real-life situations, but they generally agree about their intrinsic merit. They may not live in total harmony with them, but they believe in them. And, they want to be managed by them. They want to be evaluated by "laws" in the social and economic dimensions that are just as real, just as unchanging and unarguable, as laws such as gravity are in the physical dimension.

In any serious study of history - be it national or corporate - the reality and verity of such principles become obvious. These principles surface time and again, and the degree to which people in a society recognize and live in harmony with them moves them toward either survival and stability or disintegration and destruction.

In a talk show interview, I was once asked if Hitler was principal-centered. "No," I said, "but he was value-driven. One of his governing values was to unify Germany. But he violated compass principles and suffered the natural consequences. And the consequences were momentous - the dislocation of the entire world for years."

In dealing with self-evident, natural laws, we can choose either to manage in harmony with them or to challenge them by working some other way. Just as the laws are fixed, so too are the consequences. In my seminars, I ask audiences, "When you think of your personal values, how do you think?" Typically, people focus on what they want. I then ask them, "When you think of principles, how do you think?" They are more oriented toward objective law - listening to conscious, tapping into eternal verities. Principles are not values. The German Nazis, like the street gang members, shared values, but these violated basic principles.

Values are maps. Principles are territories. And the maps are not the territories; they are only subjective attempts to describe or represent the territory. The more closely our maps are aligned with correct principles - with the realties of the territory, with things as they are - the more accurate and useful they will be. Correct maps will impact our effectiveness far more than our efforts to change attitudes and behaviors. However, when the territory is constantly changing, when the markets are constantly shifting, any map is soon obsolete.

A Compass for the Times:
In today's world, what's needed is a compass. A compass consists of a magnetic needle swinging freely and pointing to magnetic north. It's also a mariner's instrument for directing or ascertaining the course of ships at sea as well as an instrument for drawing circles and taking measurements. The word compass may also refer to the reach, extent, limit or boundary of a space or time; a course, circuit or range; an intent, purpose or design; an understanding or comprehension. All of these connotations enrich the meaning of the metaphor.

Why is a compass better than a map in today's business world? I see several compelling reasons why the compass is so invaluable to corporate leaders: The compass orients people to the coordinates and indicates a course or direction even in forests, deserts, seas and open, unsettled terrain. As the territory changes, the map becomes obsolete; in times of rapid change, a map may be dated and inaccurate by the time it's printed. Inaccurate maps are a frustration for people who are trying to find their way or navigate territory.

Many executives are pioneering, managing in uncharted waters or wilderness, and no existing map accurately describes the territory. To get anywhere very fast, we need refined processes and clear channels of production and distribution (freeways), and to find or create freeways in the map provides description, but the compass provides more vision and direction.

An accurate map is a good management tool, but a compass is a leadership and an empowerment tool. People who have been using maps for many years to find their way and maintain a sense of perspective and direction should realize that their maps may be useless in the current maze and wilderness of management. My recommendation is that you exchange your map for a compass and train yourself and your people how to navigate by a compass calibrated to a set of fixed, true north principles and natural laws.

Strategic Orientation:
Map vs. compass orientation is an important strategic issue, as reflected in the statement by Mr. Matsushitu, president of the Japan's giant consumer electronic company: "We are going to win and the industrial West is going to lose because the reasons for your failure are within yourselves: for you, the essence of management is to get the ideas out of the heads of the bosses into the hands of labor." The important thing here is the stated reason for our "failure." We are locked into certain mindsets or paradigms, locked into management by maps, locked into an old model of leadership where the experts at the top decide the objectives, methods, and means.

This old strategic planning model is obsolete. It's a road map. It calls for people at the top to exercise their experience, expertise, wisdom and judgment and set 10-year strategic plans - only to find that the plans are worthless within 18 months. In the new environment, with speed to market timetables of 18 months instead of five years, plans become obsolete fast.

Peter Drucker has said: "Plans are worthless, but planning is invaluable." And if our planning is centered on an overall purpose or vision and on a commitment to a set of principles, then the people who are closest to the action in the wilderness can use that compass and their own expertise and judgment to make decisions and take actions. In effect, each person may have his or her own compass; each may be empowered to decide objectives and make plans that reflect the realities of the new market.

Principles are not practices. Practices are specific activities or actions that work in one circumstance but not necessarily in another. If you manage by practices and lead by policies, your people don't have to be the experts; they don't have to exercise judgment, because all of the judgment and wisdom is provided them in the form of rules and regulations.

If you focus on principles, you empower everyone who understands those principles to act without constant monitoring, evaluating, correcting or controlling. Principles have universal application. And when these are internalized into habits, they empower people to create a wide variety of practices to deal with different situation.

Leading by principles, as opposed to practices, requires a different kind of training, perhaps even more training, but the payoff is more expertise, creativity, and shared responsibility at all levels of the organization.

If you train people in the practices of customer service, you will get a degree of customer service, but the service will break down whenever customers present a special case or problem because in doing so they short-circuit the Standard Operating Procedure system.

Before people will consistently act on the principle of customer service, they need to adopt a new mindset. In most cases, they need to be trained - using cases, role plays, simulations and some on-the-job coaching - to be sure they understand the principle and how it is applied on the job.

With the Compass, We Can Win:
"A compass in every pocket" is better than "a chicken in every pot" or a car in every garage.

The president of a major corporation recently asked me to meet with him and his management team. He said that they were all too concerned with reserving their own management style. He said that the corporate mission statement had no impact on their style. These executives felt that the mission was for the people "out there" who were subject to the law, but that they were above the law. The idea of moral compassing is unsettling to people who think they are above the law. Because the constitution, based on principles, is the law - it governs everybody, including the president. It places responsibility on individuals to examine their lives and determine if they are willing to live by it.

All Are Accountable to the Laws and Principles:
I'm familiar with several poignant examples of major U.S. corporations telling their consultants, "We can't continue to do market feasibility studies and strategic studies independent of our culture and people." These executives understand what Michael Porter has said: "A implementation with B strategy is better than A strategy with B implementation.

We must deal with people/culture issues to improve the implementation of strategy and to achieve corporate integrity. We must be willing to go through a constitutional convention, if not a revolutionary war, to get the issues out on the table, deal with them, and get deep buy-in on the decisions. That won't happen without some blood, sweat, and tears.

Ultimately, the successful implementation of any strategy hinges on the integrity people have to the governing principles and on their ability to apply those principles in any situation using their own moral compass.

Quotes I like

Since you cannot do good to all, you are to pay special attention to those who, by the accidents of time, or place, or circumstances, are brought into closer connection with you. ~ Augustine

Quotes I like

"Apparently there is nothing that cannot happen today." ~ Mark Twain

"Since love grows within you, so beauty grows. For love is the beauty of the soul. " ~ Augustine

"That we come as a seed of who we might be and make choices which tend ourselves as we grow towards who we are becoming. so ... the idea of where we spend our time and collect our thoughts is pretty consequential ". ~unknown

"How to hit home runs: I swing as hard as I can, and I try to swing right through the ball... The harder you grip the bat, the more you can swing it through the ball, and the farther the ball will go. I swing big, with everything I've got. I hit big or I miss big. I like to live as big as I can." ~ Babe Ruth

"Often we don't even discover them as memories until years later when they emerge, not as they were, but as they have become as our souls expand enough to value what we thought at the time was dross as the real gold of our lives". ~ Gerard Van der Leun

“It is by loving, and not by being loved, that one can come nearest the soul of another; yea, that, where two love, it is the loving of each other, that originates and perfects and assures their blessedness. I knew that love gives to him that loveth, power over any soul beloved, even if that soul know him not, bringing him inwardly close to that spirit; a power that cannot be but for good; for in proportion as selfishness intrudes, the love ceases, and the power which springs therefrom dies. Yet all love will, one day, meet with its return. ” ~ George MacDonald, Phantastes

“from what we cannot hold the stars are made” ~ W.S.Merwin

“we travel far and fast and as we pass through we forget where we have been” ~ W.S.Merwin

"Ring the bells that still can ring Forget your perfect offering There is a crack, a crack in everything That's how the light gets in.

"Always do what you are afraid to do." ~ Emerson

“Sometimes you will never know the value of something,until it becomes a memory.” ~ Dr. Seuss

"Hope is a state of mind, not of the world. Hope, in this deep and powerful sense, is not the same as joy that things are going well, or willingness to invest in enterprises that are obviously heading for success, but rather an ability to work for something because it is good." ~ Vaclav Havel

"Pure logical thinking cannot yield us any knowledge of the empirical world: all knowledge of reality starts from experience and ends in it....Because Galileo saw this, and particularly because he drummed it into the scientific world he is the father of modern physics-indeed, of modern science altogether." ~Einstein

"The difficulty lies, not in the new ideas, but in escaping the old ones, which ramify, for those brought up as most of us have been, into every corner of our minds." ~John Maynard Keyes

"Oh, the comfort, the inexpressible comfort of feeling safe with a person; having neither to weigh thoughts nor measure words, but to pour them all out, just as they are, chaff and grain together, knowing that a faithful hand will take and sift them, keep what is worth keeping, and then, with a breath of kindness, blow the rest away." ~ George Eliot

"If nothing saves us from death, may love at least save us from life." - Pablo Neruda

"Yes I am a dreamer. For a dreamer is one who can only find his way by moonlight, and his punishment is that he sees the dawn before the rest of the world." ~ Oscar Wilde

"God bears His soul in the words of His book - thereby He draws me to Himself." ~ Gary Spooner

"Negative capability...is being capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason." ~ John Keats

"If you had the chance to change your fate, would you?" ~ Merida from BRAVE

"There are those who say fate is something beyond our command. That destiny is not our own, but I know better. Our fate lives within us, you only have to be brave enough to see it." ~ Merida from BRAVE

What lies behind us and what lies before us are small matters compared to what lies within us." ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

“There would be no chance at all of getting to know death if it happened only once. But fortunately, life is nothing but a continuing dance of birth and death, a dance of change. Every time I hear the rush of a mountain stream, or the waves crashing on the shore, or my own heartbeat, I hear the sound of impermanence. These changes, these small deaths, are our living links with death. They are death’s pulses, death’s heartbeat, prompting us to let go of all the things we cling to.” ~ Sogyal Rinpoche

"Beauty is not in the face; beauty is a light in the heart." ~ Kahlil Gibran

“It's a bizarre but wonderful feeling, to arrive dead center of a target you didn't even know you were aiming for.” ~ Lois McMaster Bujold

"Worship is the submission of all of our nature to God. It is the quickening of conscience by His holiness, nourishment of mind by His truth, purifying of imagination by His beauty, opening of the heart to His love, and submission of will to His purpose. All this gathered up in adoration is the greatest of all expressions of which we are capable." ~ William Temple

“The truth of the matter is that you always know the right thing to do. The hard part is doing it.” ~ Norman Schwarzkopf

"True leadership only exists if people follow when they have the freedom not to." ~Jim Collins

"The practice of leadership is not the same as the exercise of power."~James MacGregor Burns

“They slipped briskly into an intimacy from which they never recovered.” ~ F. Scott Fitzgerald, This Side of Paradise

"To contemplate Supreme Truth is like looking upon the face of God; it is consumation and therefore extermination, while learning, which is an endless extenstion of conscious activity, is the striving after, but not the acquisition of truth." ~Martin Nozick (Miquel De Unamuno*The Agony of Belief)

"Dreams are true while they last, and do we not live in dreams?" ~ Tennyson

“There is meaning in every journey that is unknown to the traveler.” ~Bonhoeffer

"For my part I know nothing with certainty, but the sight of the stars makes me dream." ~ Vincent Van Gogh

“These are the days that must happen to you.” ~ Whitman

"We die daily. Happy those who daily come to life as well." ~George MacDonald

"Love ceases to be a demon only when he ceases to be a god." ~ Dennis De Rougemont

“Sometimes the questions are complicated and the answers are simple.” ~ Dr.Seuss

"All that we may see or seem, is but a dream within a dream." ~ Edgar Allan Poe

“The strongest and sweetest songs yet remain to be sung.” ~ Whitman

“Have you learned the lessons only of those who admired you, and were tender with you, and stood aside for you? Have you not learned great lessons from those who braced themselves against you, and disputed passage with you?” ~ Walt Whitman

"Man is not imprisoned by habit. Great changes in him can be wrought by crisis - once that crisis can be recognized and understood. " ~ Norman Cousins

“Some people meet the way the sky meets the earth, inevitably, and there is no stopping or holding back their love. It exists in a finished world, beyond the reach of common sense.” ~ Louise Erdrich, Tales of Burning Love

“When we are young, the words are scattered all around us. As they are assembled by experience, so also are we, sentence by sentence, until the story takes shape.” ~ Louise Erdrich, The Plague of Doves

“I think the universe was spontaneously created out of nothing, according to the laws of science. It has no beginning and no end.” ~ Stephen Hawking

“They were so strong in their beliefs that there came a time when it hardly mattered what exactly those beliefs were; they all fused into a single stubbornness” ~ Louise Erdrich

"I cannot imagine a God who rewards and punishes the objects of his creation, whose purposes are modeled after our own--a God, in short, who is but a reflection of human frailty." ~ Einstein

“There are moments in life, when the heart is so full of emotion that if by chance it be shaken, or into its depths like a pebble drops some careless word, it overflows, and its secret, spilt on the ground like water, can never be gathered together” ~ H.W. Longfellow

“We do not receive wisdom, we must discover it for ourselves, after a journey through the wilderness which no one else can make for us, which no one can spare us, for our wisdom is the point of view from which we come at last to regard the world. The lives that you admire, the attitudes that seem noble to you, have not been shaped by a paterfamilias or a schoolmaster, they have sprung from very different beginnings, having been influenced by evil or commonplace that prevailed round them. They represent a struggle and a victory.” Marcel Proust

"To do the useful thing, to say the courageous thing, to contemplate the beautiful thing: that is enough for one man's life." ~ T. S. Eliot

"Your work is to discover your world and then with all your heart give yourself to it." ~ Buddha

"The way is not in the sky. The way is in the heart." ~ Buddha

"Nothing happens unless first a dream." ~ Carl Sandburg

"We can do no great things - only small things with great love." ~ Mother Teresa

"Thinking is the talking of the soul with itself." ~ Plato

"The hunger for love is much more difficult to remove than the hunger for bread." ~Mother Teresa

"We see things as we are, not as they are. " ~ Leo Rosten

"I learned that it is the weak who are cruel, and that gentleness is to be expected only from the strong. " ~ Leo Rosten

“I'm proof against that word failure. I've seen behind it. The only failure a man ought to fear is failure of cleaving to the purpose he sees to be best.” ~ T.S. Eliot

" Heaven wheels above you, displaying to you her eternal glories, and still your eyes are on the ground. " ~ Dante

Personality implies that as this person: I am completely determined on every side and so finite, yet nonetheless I am simply and solely self-relation, and therefore in finitude I know myself as something infinite, – universal, and free. Philosophy of Right (1821) ~ GWF Hegel ... and ... ‘Person’ is essentially different from ‘subject’, since ‘subject’ is only the possibility of personality; every living thing of any sort is a subject. A person, then, is a subject aware of this subjectivity, since in personality it is of myself alone that I am aware. Philosophy of Right (1821) ~ Hegel ... and ... ‘Be a person and respect others as persons.’ Philosophy of Right (1821) ~ Hegel

"I've loved the stars too fondly to be fearful of the night." ~ Galileo

"Night is purer than day; it is better for thinking and loving and dreaming. At night everything is more intense, more true. The echo of words that have been spoken during the day takes on a new and deeper meaning. The tragedy of man is that he doesn't know how to distinguish between day and night. He says things at night that should only be said by day." ~ Elie Wiesel (Dawn)

"Think higher, feel deeper." ~ Elie Wiesel

"One person of integrity can make a difference." ~ Elie Wiesel

"Words can sometimes, in moments of grace, attain the quality of deeds." ~ Elie Wiesel

"... Their words aren't heard, their voices aren't recorded, but their silence fills the earth: unspoken truth is spoken everywhere..." Ps 19:3-4 ~ King David

"I distinctly remember forgetting that." ~ Clara Barton

"This constellation in the dark - grace, thanksgiving, joy - it might be like that - reaching for the stars. So hard. So hard." ~ Ann Voskamp

"People think a soul mate is your perfect fit, and that's what everyone wants. But a true soul mate is a mirror, the person who shows you everything that is holding you back, the person who brings you to your own attention so you can change your life." ~ Liz Gilbert

"If you want to be happy, be." ~ Henry David Thoreau

"In the midst of winter, I finally learned that there was in me an invincible summer." ~ Albert Camus

“Forbid us something, and that thing we desire” ~ Geoffrey Chaucer

'There is no easy way from the earth to the stars. -Non est ad astra mollis e terris via." ~ Seneca

"Never take counsel of your fears." ~ General Stonewall Jackson

"the truth is, everyone is going to hurt you...you just got to find the ones worth suffering for..." ~Bob Marley

"A compliment is something like a kiss through a veil."-~Victor Hugo

"He who chooses the beginning of a road chooses the place it leads to. It is the means that determine the end." Harry Emerson Fosdick

"The difficulty in life is the choice." - George A Moore

"... who would not, finding a way, break loose from hell ... and boldly venture to whatever place farthest from pain?" - John Milton (Paradise Lost)

"If you limit your choices only to what seems possible or reasonable, you disconnect yourself from what you truly want, and all that is left is compromise." - Robert Fritz

"Choose the life that is most useful, and habit will make it the most agreeable." - Sir Francis Bacon

"There are always two choices. Two paths to take. One is easy. And its only reward is that it's easy." - Richard Bach

"The future is not a result of choices among alternate paths offered by the present, but a place that is created ... created first in the mind and will, created next in activity. The future is not some place we are going to, but one we are creating. The paths are not found, but made, and the activity of making them, changes both the maker and the destination." - Richard Bach

"Honor isn't about making the right choices. It's about dealing with the consequences." - Richard Bach

"Some choices we live not once but a thousand times over, remembering them for the rest of our lives." - Eleanor Roosevelt

"Instead of looking at life as a narrowing funnel, we can see it ever widening to choose the things we want to do, to take the wisdom we've learned and create something." - Liz Carpenter

"If you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice." Neil Peart

"In the long run, we shape our lives and we shape ourselves. The process never ends until we die. And the choices we make are ultimately our own responsibility." - Victor Frankl

" The last of human freedoms is to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances." - Victor Frankl

"Tomorrow is the most important thing in life. Comes into us at midnight very clean. It's perfect when it arrives and puts itself in our hands. It hopes we've learned something from yesterday." - John Wayne

"For what is the best choice for each individual is the highest it is possible for him to acheive ... we are what we repeatedly do. Excellence then is not an act but a habit. What we have to learn to do, we learn by doing." - Aristotle

Quotes I like:

"The march of improvement in any given field is always marked by periods of inactivity and then by sudden bursts of energy which revolutionize existing methods sometimes in a day." ~ George Eastman

"As a single footstep will not make a path on the earth, so a single thought will not make a single pathway in the mind. To make a deep physical path, we walk again and again. To make a deep mental path, we must think over and over the kind of thoughts we wish to dominate our lives." ~Henry David Thoreau

"The Art of Thinking is the art of being one's self and this art can only be learned if one is by one's self." ~Ernest Dimnet

'It is a dangerous thing to ask why someone else has been given more. It is humbling -- and indeed healthy -- to ask why you have been given so much." ~ Condoleeza Rice (commencement speech at University of Alabama

"... life does not consist mainly -- or even largely -- of facts and happenings. It consists mainly of the storm of thougths that is forever blowing through one's head. " ~ Mark Twain

"It is human life. We are blown upon the world; we float buoyantly upon the summer air a little while, complacently showing off our grace of form and our dainty iridescent colors; then we vanish with a little puff, leaving nothing behind but a memory--and sometimes not even that. I suppose that at those solemn times when we wake in the deeps of the night and reflect, there is not one of us who is not willing to confess that he is really only a soap-bubble, and as little worth the making." ~ Mark Twain

"God's gift to you is life itself. What you do with it is your gift to God." ~ Leo Buscaglia

"Success is relative. It is what we can make of the mess we have made of things. ~ T.S. Eliot

"For believe me: the secret for harvesting from existence the greatest fruitfulness and greatest enjoyment is - to live dangerously." Also; "A thinker sees his own actions as experiments and questions--as attempts to find out something. Success and failure are for him answers above all." Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science

''I would finish hoeing my garden.'' ~ St. Francis of Assisi

"Friends... they cherish one another's hopes. They are kind to one another's dreams." ~ Thoreau

"It's not what you look at that matters, it's what you see." ~ Thoreau

"A man is rich in proportion to the number of things he can afford to let alone." ~ Thoreau

"I did not wish to take a cabin passage, but rather to go before the mast and on the deck of the world, for there I could best see the moonlight amid the mountains. I do not wish to go below now." ~ Thoreau

"It is best to avoid the beginnings of evil." ~ Thoreau

"If we will be quiet and ready enough, we shall find compensation in every disappointment." ~Thoreau

"I put a piece of paper under my pillow, and when I could not sleep I wrote in the dark." ~ Thoreau

"I have found that hollow, which even I had relied on for solid." ~ Thoreau

"I know of no more encouraging fact than the unquestionable ability of man to elevate his life by conscious endeavor." ~ Thoreau

"In human intercourse the tragedy begins, not when there is misunderstanding about words, but when silence is not understood." ~ Thoreau

"The man who goes alone can start today; but he who travels with another must wait till that other is ready." ~ Thoreau

"Nothing makes the earth seem so spacious as to have friends at a distance; they make the latitudes and longitudes." ~ Thoreau

"No face which we can give to a matter will stead us so well at last as the truth. This alone wears well." ~ Thoreau

"Most men lead lives of quiet desperation and go to the grave with the song still in them." ~ Thoreau

There's enough poison in that drink to kill an army platoon. Good thing I'm a marine." - chuck/tv

"Hell, there are no rules here- we're trying to accomplish something." - Thomas A Edison

"Do more than belong, participate. Do more than care, help. Do more than believe, practice. Do more than be fair, be kind. Do more than forgive, forget. Do more than dream, work." - W. A. Ward"

"Death isn't sad. The sad thing is: most people don't live at all." - Socrates in The Peaceful Warrior

"Try not. Do, or do not. There is no try." which is Yoda from "The Empire Strikes Back"

"Happiness cannot be traveled to, owned, earned, worn or consumed. Happiness is the spiritual experience of living every minute with love, grace and gratitude." - Denis Waitley

"There is no duty we so much underrate as the duty of being happy." - R.L. Stevenson

"Only those who risk going too far can possibly find out how far one can go." - T.S. Eliot

"The cost of a thing is the amount of what I will call life which is required to be exchanged for it, immediately or in the long run" ~Thoreau

"Character is like a tree and reputation like a shadow. The shadow is what we think of it; the tree is the real thing." - Abraham Lincoln

"Who so loves believes the impossible.” - Elizabeth Barrett Browning

"Earth's crammed with heaven, And every common bush afire with God; But only he who sees, takes off his shoes - The rest sit round it and pluck blackberries.” - Elizabeth Barrett Browning

"Far better to dare mighty things, to win glorious triumphs, even though checkered by failure, then to take rank with those poor spirits who neither enjoy much nor suffer much, because they live in the grey twilight that knows not victory nor defeat." - Theodore Roosevelt

"Avoid having your ego so close to your position that when your position falls, your ego goes with it." - Colin Powell

"The freedom to pursue an aesthetic quality in life is an added dimension, like being able to fly where others walk." - Truman Capote

"Do you have the patience to wait til your mud settles and the water is clear? Can you remain unmoving till the right action arises by itself?" - Lao Tzu

"When someone loves you, the way they say your name is different. You just know that your name is safe in their mouth." Billy - age 4

"Leadership is getting someone to do what they don't want to do, to achieve what they want to achieve." - Tom Landry

...and more favorite quotes...

"But the dream is never forgotten, only put aside and never out of reach: Where once the dream connected boys with the world of men, now it reconnects men with the spirit of boys." ~ John Thorn

“My real self wanders elsewhere, far away, wanders on and on invisibly and has nothing to do with my life.” ― Hermann Hesse

“Ordinary riches can be stolen, real riches cannot. In your soul are infinitely precious things that cannot be taken from you.” ~ Oscar Wilde

"Happiness makes up in height for what it lacks in length." ~ Robert Frost

"A bone to the dog is not charity. Charity is the bone shared with the dog, when you are just as hungry as the dog." ~ Jack London

"It is written on the arched sky; it looks out from every star. It is the poetry of Nature; it is that which uplifts the spirit within us." ~ John Ruskin

No more is it a question of speaking of space and light: the question is to make space and light, which are there, speak to us." ~ Merleau-Ponty

"The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort and convenience, but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy." ~ Dr. ML King

"Originality is... a by-product of sincerity." ~Marianne Moore

"Things can fall apart, or threaten to, for many reasons, and then there's got to be a leap of faith. Ultimately, when you're at the edge, you have to go forward or backward; if you go forward, you have to jump together." - Yo-Yo Ma

"Dreams are illustrations... from the book your soul is writing about you." - Marsha Norman

"After climbing a great hill, one only finds that there are many more hills to climb." - Nelson Mandela

"If we long to believe that the stars rise and set for us, that we are the reason there is a Universe, does science do us a disservice in deflating our conceits? " - Carl Sagan